


Night

by AconitumNapellus



Series: Hung [4]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Dreams, Friendship, Gen, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 19:45:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11237919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: After being hung from his wrists in a Belgian chateau for three nights, Illya is having nightmares.Another (yes, another) instalment in my 'Hung' series, which won't leave my head.  This one's gen, but as always, they're a couple somewhere in my mind.





	Night

The nightmares are so very real. Hanging, hanging. He can’t breathe. With his arms like that there’s so much pressure through his rib cage that he can hardly pull in a breath. His body is a sack of lead, all hanging from his shoulders, his elbows, his agonised wrists. And the hanging pulls his ribcage upward, tilts it upwards so he’s pigeon-chested, stretches his abdomen out into a taut, flat sheet. What can the diaphragm do with that? How can it draw down and pull air into the balloons of his lungs?

He tips his head back and opens his mouth, in the dream, and tries to breathe. He opens his mouth wide, his eyes muffled closed by the blindfold, his nostrils covered. The air is solid, heavy, like breathing through foam. He gasps with his mouth because he’s so thirsty, and from somewhere fist-sized chunks of snow are there, someone drops a fist of snow into his mouth, but although the snow melts it melts into nothing good. It’s like sucking on polystyrene, and his tongue is like old leather, his throat a dried out tube, and –

He comes awake weeping, his mouth working. He’s too hot and his mouth is dry like a wrung-out sponge, and his shoulders – Oh –

There aren’t even words in his weeping. He’s so desperate for water and air, his mouth gaping, his tongue retching forwards as he utters wordless cries of distress and pain.

‘Na – Na – ’

A hand at the back of his head, fingers against his sweat-damp hair. Napoleon is helping him sit up, is pressing a glass of lukewarm water against his lips. He drinks, drinks, drinks, gulping that precious liquid into his body and gasping air in around the gulps. His ribs ache and every muscle of his abdomen aches from the shield just beneath his ribcage to the tight flatness just above his pubis. The whole plane is a protesting sheet, nothing to the pain in his shoulders, of course; nothing touches that; but it’s pain in its own right, pain when he breathes, pain when he sits up, sits down, swallows, coughs.

‘Hot?’ Napoleon asks, and Illya murmurs, ‘Yes,’ because it hurts to nod, so Napoleon goes across to open the window and Illya slips his legs over the edge of the bed and follows him, unconcerned about nudity or privacy. He’s hot and he needs air and space and peace.

Napoleon forces the window up and Illya stands there, leaning slightly so his face and chest are out in the air, his dignity preserved by the sill just above waist height. He just stands there and breathes. The air outside is warm but it is air, at least. He isn’t struggling to get it into his lungs. Napoleon leaves the room and comes back again, and this time the glass of water is fresh and cold, and Illya drinks the whole thing when Napoleon puts it to his lips.

The street outside is very quiet. Somewhere a distance away traffic moves, but this street is quiet. Most of the windows opposite are dark, but the city sparkles with lights. The graceful peak of the Empire State Building glows serenely under its floodlights. Somewhere out of sight a neon sign is flashing; it illuminates the buildings nearby in its red and blue.

‘Better?’ Napoleon asks.

‘Yes,’ Illya says.

Even though his shoulders hurt so much, even though he woke from yet another nightmare, there’s a deep peace in standing here at the window of Napoleon’s bedroom, looking out over the city and all its lights. He takes in another deep breath and savours how it reaches the bottom of his lungs. He savours the feeling of his thirst being completely sated.

‘It’s time for your painkillers anyway,’ Napoleon says. ‘You think you can manage without the morphine?’

‘I want to try,’ Illya says. He’s so afraid of becoming dependent on the morphine. His thigh is like a pincushion, covered in little needle marks. At first the morphine was the only thing that would touch the pain.

‘Okay,’ Napoleon says, and goes to get the pills.

Illya appreciates this so much. He wakes Napoleon every time he has a bad dream, wakes him when he needs his painkillers, wakes him when he’s thirsty. Napoleon’s sleep is deeper and more peaceful when he does drop off, far more than Illya’s, which is always cut through with pain, but he wakes so often in the night with Illya that during the day he looks just as haggard. During the day they set off chains of yawns.

‘Open up,’ Napoleon says, and Illya turns back into the room. Napoleon pops the pills in through Illya’s parted lips and Illya swallows them with the water Napoleon gives him. A warm gust of air comes through the window and licks at some of the sweat on his back. He shivers, unable to catch the autonomic reaction, and then hisses because shivering makes his shoulders hurt so much. Napoleon puts a hand on Illya’s side.

‘Come on, patient. Back to bed. We all need our beauty sleep.’

‘Some more than others,’ Illya murmurs, and is gratified when Napoleon regards him and gives him one of those truly Napoleonic looks; a wrinkling of the nose and a little shudder, a gesture which no other man could reproduce.

‘Don’t sass the nurse,’ Napoleon says, and nods at the wide queen bed with its rumpled sheets. ‘Hop in,’ he says, but he skips ahead of Illya to straighten out the sheets before Illya sits down on the bed, and when he lies down he carefully draws the thin covers over him, then goes to close the window he had opened and to turn on the air conditioning unit so that cooler air starts to pump into the room.

‘Bourgeoisie,’ Illya murmurs, and Napoleon snorts as he gets into his own bed, the narrow spare which he has brought into the room so that he’s on hand for Illya through the night.

‘You bet your life,’ Napoleon replies. ‘This bourgeoisie is going to be cool enough to sleep, but if his humble proletariat roommate is very good, maybe he can share in the bounty.’

‘If this humble proletariat can sleep through the racket,’ Illya grumbles, but the cool air is already a blessing. Perhaps if the room keeps this cool he might survive the night without another nightmare. Miracles can happen.

  


((O))

  


He’s hanging. He’s always hanging, but this time the scene is so strange. He’s at a fairground. Perhaps it’s Coney Island, where he’s been a couple of times; strange little interludes of childish fun between the deadly business of being an agent for the U.N.C.L.E.. Perhaps it’s that fair in Cambridge, the sparkling night that sits so firmly in his memory. Perhaps it’s a fairground of his youth, one of those places he went with his school and college friends, when he worried his mother by staying out too late in the hot summer night.

It’s probably a mixture of all those things. One doesn’t analyse things in dreams. One accepts such strangenesses and oddities as if they’re normal life. So he’s at a funfair and the dusk is growing all around him and the lights are bright and beautiful on all the rides. There are great globes of yellow light on lampposts, stars in the sky that are so bright that when he turns his neck back they are dazzling. A great celestial music, he thinks. There’s a band in a bandstand and their music rises to meet the stars. He’s in the band now, amongst the players, and he’s got his oboe, the mouthpiece between his lips, his fingers on the keys. It’s so wonderful, so freeing, to be able to play music along with the band, but he can’t catch what they’re playing and the sheet music on the stand in front of him is blurred. He strains to read it and tries to keep playing, to keep time, to keep in tune, but his shoulders hurt, god how they hurt, and a cry translates itself to an intemperate puff of air through the reed.

Everyone turns to look at him. He realises that he’s half naked and filthy and he shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t be in the band, shouldn’t be playing. He’s not one of them. He doesn’t belong here. His shoulders and his elbows and his wrists and fingers hurt and he drops the oboe onto the ground. It shatters on the rough concrete and he feels such a sense of loss.

He’s hanging. He’s hanging from the rails at the top of the rollercoaster. He can feel the rumble of the cars through the rails, translating through the chains into his wrists, through his bones, right down into his shoulders, his neck, his skull. It’s an ominous feeling. He knows it’s there somewhere. He knows the train is somewhere, coming, coming. He can hear the screams of the people on board. They’re screaming in fun, and he opens his mouth to try to add his screams to theirs, but his is a scream of pure terror, and it sticks in his throat, won’t come out of his throat. He hangs there, his scream dry and silent, his shoulders in agony. His spine hurts. Somewhere in his lower back it hurts, and his pelvis hurts, and his legs ache with tiredness. His body is so heavy, a side of meat, a useless side of meat.

He tries to tip his head back and sees the rails above him, sees their pale thickness like curving bones, and above them there are the stars, still full of that music, the music of the band. He recognises the music now. Широка страна моя родная, drifting through the air, sinking down from the stars. He tries to sing but he can’t catch the words. Somehow the Russian is drifting away from him, somehow he’s disconnected, so far apart from everything, hanging so far from the ground, separated from his country, from his people, from everything he was given at birth.

He hears a shout and he can’t look down because of the way he’s hanging, but he sees all the same. Napoleon is there. He’s down at the bottom, on the ground, and Illya is right up at the top, fifty feet up, his bare feet hanging in thin, warm air, his urine trickling down his leg and dripping from his toes. Drip, drip. Even from all this distance he hears it splatter on the dusty concrete below. He sees the little puffs of dry dust when the liquid hits the ground.

Napoleon is trying to climb up the rails. He’s trying, but he’s slipping, and he’s in the path of the train. The train is coming, coming. He needs to warn Napoleon. The rumble translates through the rails into Illya’s body, and it agonises and terrifies him, and he opens his dry mouth again and tries to scream, to scream, to –

‘Illya! Illya!’

Napoleon? Where is Napoleon? The train’s coming, his fingers are over the top of the rails, the train will go over his hands, crush his fingers to patties of blood and bone and flesh, roar on, sweep down on Napoleon –

‘Illya, wake up now. Wake up.’

He wakes with a bellow and a strangled scream, bolting upright in bed and reaching out, and –

‘No, Illya!’

Napoleon catches his wrists as the pain sears through him. He gives another strangled cry, sobbing out his pain.

‘Боже, о боже, боже,’ he cries. ‘Дерьмо, дерьмо...’

‘Illya? You awake?’ Napoleon asks.

Illya blinks tears from his eyes, registers the firm fabric of the slings that stopped him from flailing out dangerously, registers the feeling of Napoleon’s hand on one wrist, and the pressure of it on the cast that covers his other wrist, stopping him from moving. The pain in his shoulders is like hot skewers being twisted in his joints.

‘ Дерьмо,’ he hisses again. ‘God...’

‘Well, that was a doozy,’ Napoleon comments, picking up Illya’s glass of water and offering it to him. Illya drinks but he still feels disjointed, confused, under threat. He looks around the room, grounds himself in the sharp angles of the corners, the dark shapes of the furniture in the dim bedside light, finally grounding himself in the face of Napoleon.

‘Y’okay?’ Napoleon asks, looking hard into his face, smiling a little.

‘Yes,’ Illya says. ‘No. I – ’

‘Well, that’s decisive. Would you like me to buy you a compass?’

Illya looks at Napoleon, bewildered.

‘Yeah, well, I guess you couldn’t use it anyway. Can’t hold it in your palm,’ Napoleon says.

Illya just doesn’t know how to speak. Russian and Ukrainian and English and French are all swimming in his head. He blinks again and Napoleon takes a handkerchief and wipes his eyes and asks, ‘You ready to go back to sleep,  _ tovarisch _ ?’

‘I – No, no,’ Illya says. ‘No.’

He can’t bear the thought of sleep. He can still feel the rumble of that rollercoaster, hear Napoleon’s grunts and breaths as he climbs up the slick rails. He can feel himself hanging and waiting for the slam of the cars over his fingers, waiting for them to smash into Napoleon and obliterate him, and he doesn’t want to go back anywhere where that could happen.

He looks down at the thin sheet he was sleeping under, tries to kick it off his legs, gets tangled. Every little movement hurts. Napoleon helps him, pulling back the sheet, and Illya gets up, hissing his pain as he moves. He stands for a moment, none too steady, then walks out of the bedroom, through the open door, into the bathroom. He sits on the open toilet and lets a hot stream of urine leave his body, then looks up to see Napoleon in the doorway, watching him.

‘Can’t a man have any privacy?’ he growls, and Napoleon smiles.

‘I think we lost all of that in Belgium,’ he says.

Illya huffs. Napoleon’s right, of course. Of course he is. He lost all of that when he was lying on the ballroom floor in that Belgian château and Napoleon peeled off his clothes and started to clean up the terrible mess from his hanging for days without any kind of sanitary care. Sometimes he feels like he can smell that again, like he suddenly gets a whiff of stale urine and shit and the dusty smell of the wooden floor, and something flips over inside him. It’s like taking a step and finding there’s nothing beneath your feet.

Of course any sense of privacy was eroded later, too, when he was lying in the hotel room and Napoleon carefully cleaned every inch of him, cleaning away all the last remnants of sweat and waste from his body. It ebbed away when they acknowledged that it was far easier for Illya to be naked at night because it’s hot anyway, and then he doesn’t need to ask for help if he needs a quick toilet visit. They lost it when they agreed that for Illya to shower it’s necessary for Napoleon to strip off and get in with him. They’ve become easy in each other’s company, easier than they ever were, as if they are brothers or lovers. There’s nothing left to hide.

‘Come on, Illya, tell me about it,’ Napoleon says.

Illya shakes himself, a careful little movement to try to shake out the last drops of urine without hurting his shoulders too much. Then he stands. A few inevitable drips fall onto his thigh and foot, and Napoleon takes a couple of sheets of toilet paper and swipes them away.

‘What is there to tell?’ Illya asks rather darkly. ‘It was a dream. I don’t remember very well.’

He remembers better than he would admit, but it is drifting away in part. Dreams are like the candy floss he used to buy at those fairs. So big and real and  _there_ , but then they winnow away to nothing, become no more than a few distilled drops, the sense of sweetness on the tongue, the sickly feeling in the stomach. And the dark threat of rot in the teeth, of course. That dark feeling of threat is still there. It hangs on him like a cloak.

‘Go on, Illya,’ Napoleon urges him.

He would shrug, if he could. He didn’t realise how much he used to shrug until he dislocated both shoulders and hung from them for a day and a night.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘A funfair. I was hanging from the rollercoaster. You were trying to get to me.’

‘And?’

‘And the train was coming. I could feel it coming. Everyone screaming. It was going to crush my hands. It was going to run you down.’

He just catches the lurch of a sob, but it’s too late. It’s coming hard now, a sob and another sob, and another, until they’re jerking out of him. Napoleon puts a hand on his side and steers him into the kitchen, where he sits on one of the chairs, feeling the cold, hard wood against his naked buttocks and thighs, and he lets his trussed arms sit across his chest and tries to control the sobs because each one makes his shoulders scream.

‘It’s all right now,’ Napoleon tells him softly. ‘It’s all right. We’re a long way from Belgium. You’re safe now.’

‘I know. I _know_ ,’ Illya grates.

He has to try hard not to be angry at Napoleon, because Napoleon is doing everything, absolutely everything, to help him. Napoleon is pottering across the kitchen now, wearing no more than loose pyjama bottoms. He’s putting a small saucepan onto the stove and clicking the gas ring into life underneath it. He walks over to the fridge and opens the door. The milk bottles clink. He takes one out and pours some into the little pan, and it hisses on the already hot metal. Then when the milk is warm he pours it carefully into a cup, not spilling a drop, and he adds a generous splash of whisky, which swirls with the warm milk smell into the air. He brings it over to the table and sets it down in front of Illya.

‘First these,’ he says, proffering Illya two oval tablets on the palm of his hand. Illya opens his mouth and Napoleon pops them in. ‘Then this,’ he says, lifting the smooth ceramic mug to Illya’s lips, and Illya takes a mouthful of the warm, whisky-rich milk and swallows the painkillers with it. Napoleon wipes the tracks of his tears with his thumb, and Illya smiles.

‘Thank you, Napoleon,’ he says. It’s all he says at the moment. He’s always thanking Napoleon for something.

‘ _De nada_ ,’ Napoleon replies. He’s poured himself his own shot of whisky, straight, and he takes a mouthful, then lifts the milk to Illya’s mouth again. ‘We all get bad dreams,’ he says. ‘You’ve been through the mill.’

‘Yes,’ Illya agrees. ‘Yes...’

‘Psych’s helping?’

Illya grunts. Of course Psych is helping, but he hates to admit that. He hates sitting there in that little panelled room talking about everything to the psychiatrist, letting out his deepest fears, going over the worst moments of those terrible, terrible few days that he spent hanging from the ceiling by his wrists. Sometimes he realises how close he came to dying during that time, and it’s like looking up and seeing an express train heading straight for him. His heart suddenly thumps and his mouth goes dry and he’s paralysed, a rabbit in the headlights, until he catches himself and calms himself down. He steps out of the way of the train and watches it rumble past, feels the power of it through his chest and his legs and knows that that is his death there, skimming by, so close, so strong.

The nightmares are always worse after he’s been with Psych. He knows that’s part of the process too. He knows it’s all about healing. But he hates it. He hates every minute of it.

‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m really Russian any more,’ he says, picking on that one odd part of the dream so as to avoid thinking about the rollercoaster train coming, coming to crush his hands, coming to sweep Napoleon out of life. ‘Really a Soviet. Really Ukrainian.’

It’s all such a mess anyway. What is he? He learnt Ukrainian at his mother’s knee. All his lullabies are Ukrainian, all his folk tales, all his earliest memories. When his father shouts at him in his memory, sudden and angry at some childish transgression, he shouts in Ukrainian. When his mother speaks softly to him or his grandparents call to him, they do so in Ukrainian. He remembers his grandmother’s bitterness at the Russian people, recalls her refusing to speak Russian, to allow Russian in her house. But he’s proud to be Russian, proud to be Soviet. He learnt to speak Russian almost as early as he did Ukrainian. They’re like two rivers running side by side. Sometimes the waters mix. They’re quite distinct, but they both run past the path of his life, washing him, carrying him along.

‘You’ve lived away from the motherland for a long time,’ Napoleon says.

‘Yes,’ Illya replies.

Napoleon lifts his drink again, and Illya takes another creamy mouthful and lets it slip down his throat and settle in his stomach.

‘That was part of the dream,’ Illya says. ‘I don’t know why. A – an anxiety, I suppose, about my heritage. I don’t know… I was – there was a band. They were playing Широка страна моя родная, and – ’

‘Say that again, but slowly,’ Napoleon says with a grin, and Illya huffs.

‘I’ll talk Russian to you all you like, Napoleon, but not now. They were playing Широка страна моя родная and I couldn’t remember the words, I couldn’t work out the tune, I felt so disconnected from everything...’

‘It was a dream,’ Napoleon tells him softly. ‘That’s the thing about dreams. They don’t have rhyme or reason. If you’re feeling disconnected from your people then – well, maybe you need to make an effort to spend more time amongst them. There are Russian communities in New York. We both know that. Ukrainian too. I’m sure you could find someone.’

Illya smiles thinly. ‘Yes, I’ve visited those communities. They’re strange places. We’re all exiles. We’re all out in the cold for a reason.’

Napoleon sighs. ‘Drink your drink,’ he says, lifting the cup again. ‘No one’s out in the cold at this time of year in Manhattan. We’re all begging for a little cool. It’s too late – or too early, I don’t know which – for the dour Russian routine.’

Illya grunts. He feels rankled. Napoleon’s willing to talk about those awful days in Belgium. He’s willing to talk about Illya’s pain and the memories and the fear. Can’t he talk about his feeling of dislocation in the middle of this all-pervasive American culture, too? Maybe it’s too many problems all at once. Maybe Napoleon’s right. His experience in Belgium and the associated trauma are very concrete things. His feeling of being a stranger in a strange land is complicated, abstract, and not suited to this time of the morning.

‘Give me the rest of that milk,’ he says, and Napoleon lifts the mug, tips it up enough so that the last bit slips into Illya’s throat.

‘I’m sorry,’ Napoleon says. He does look sorry, his brown eyes rueful, like a dog who’s been told off. ‘I don’t mean to belittle your experience as an alien in this country, Illya. It’s just – it’s four a.m., and – ’

‘Yes,’ Illya says. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘Come back to bed,’ Napoleon says. ‘We can have philosophical discussions about the nature of nationality in the morning.’

‘I have physio, and then I have counselling,’ Illya points out.

‘Then come back to bed,’ Napoleon urges him again. ‘You’ll need your sleep for that.’

So Illya stands, his bare skin sticking for a moment to the wood of the chair.

‘Will you turn on the air conditioning?’ he asks.

‘Bourgeoisie,’ Napoleon says.

Illya looks down at his bare chest, at the hairs there, the slight sheen of sweat that covers him, sits between his slings and his skin, makes his legs glisten a little under the kitchen light.

‘I’m hot,’ he replies.

  


((O))

  


He’s somewhere in that flat Belgian countryside, running, running. The sun is so hot it’s making him dizzy. It’s making his eyes slip closed and his body feels like lead. He tries to make his legs run but it’s so hard to move, and then he’s on the ground, crawling, and he can only see what’s very close. He can see long grass, half-dead, deprived of water, tangling on the ground like hay. He clutches his fingers into the packed, dry earth, tries to drag his legs behind him, tries to stay upright. He can hardly see, but he can hear the dogs behind him, barking, pawing, sniffing. They’re coming, they’re coming, and he tries to crawl away, he tries so hard to crawl away. He drags his leg and the dog’s teeth miss it by an inch.

His heart is pounding. The fear is terrible. He tries to cry out but he can only make inarticulate noises that hardly leave his mouth. His mouth is so dry. His tongue is swollen, heavy, immovable. He can’t form words and he can’t make the screams leave his throat. The dogs are going to get him, they’re on him, they’re tearing at him –

‘Come on,’ Napoleon says. ‘Just a little further. Come on, Illya. You can make it. Just a little further.’

And he crawls, the weight of the dogs pulling on him, pulling him back by his clothes. He can’t let them touch him. He mustn’t let their teeth get his flesh. He knows what dog teeth do to flesh. He knows how much blood will run out. In a flash he sees that girl in Kyiv. He sees her torn face. He hears her scream. And he moves with a jerk, pulling free suddenly. He reaches a door, but he can only see the bottom. The white gloss paint is old and peeling and the wood at the bottom is rotting. He scrabbles up for the handle and he gets inside. He closes the door. The dogs are outside, and –

There the men are, all in their suits. They point their guns at him, and his heart thuds, and the dogs are hurling themselves at the door and he doesn’t know which is worse, the threat ahead or the threat behind.

They approach him, guns pointing at him. He can hardly lift his head. They kick him and he grunts and falls. They’re wrapping a filthy, foetid cloth around his eyes. They’re pulling him to his knees, to his feet. He’s hardly conscious, but he can feel as they put the chains around his wrists. They pick him up. Someone picks him up and he’s over the man’s shoulder, and the breath is pushed out of his lungs. He’s being carried, lifted higher. The chains are rattling. And then suddenly he’s there, he’s hanging, his entire weight is hanging from his wrists. He can hardly breathe. He can’t pull in breath. His wrists hurt so much that he wants to scream, but his throat still won’t work.

He’s hanging and swinging. The pain grows and grows. He’s half naked and people are down there in the room, dancing. They’re swirling in couples, women in colourful dresses, men in dark suits, all turning and turning to music he cannot hear. The urine is dripping down his leg and he worries it will fall on someone. Someone looks up, and then they’re all looking up and he wants to scream  _Help me, please help me, please help me_ , but his voice won’t come. Someone says something about the unusual chandelier. Some of them stop looking, they stop looking and start dancing again, turning in circles, their feet shuffling on the floor. But others are still looking, just standing there looking, and he struggles. He tries to do something, to make a noise, to somehow get them to understand. He shouldn’t be here. It isn’t right. He shouldn’t be hanging where a chandelier should be.

He pulls up with his arms, tries to fight against the chains, but suddenly his body drops and his shoulders fail and the pain explodes in him. His mouth is dry and open in silent agony while the people below him dance, or stand and point and stare, but no one helps him. Not a single one of them helps him. He hangs there and he knows he’s going to die, he’s going to rot. If he can’t scream they won’t help him, so he opens his mouth again and tries and tries to force sound from his throat.

‘Illya, for god’s sake, wake up!’

His cry is like the horn of an approaching diesel train, long, wavering, unending. It fills the room, fills his ears, something apart from himself, something he can’t control.

‘Illya!’

He tries to breathe around the cry and it turns into an animal noise, a rasping in and out, his scream all tangled up with his attempts to breathe. He blinks, and he can see, he’s lying in his bed staring at Napoleon, who is bending over him, looking down. Napoleon’s hand is on his hip, cool against his heat.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says again, more softly, his eyes looking straight down into Illya’s eyes. ‘Come on, now. You’re with me. You’re awake. You’re okay, yes?’

‘I’m okay,’ he says.

He stretches his mouth, sticks his tongue out in disgust at the horrid dryness, and Napoleon says, ‘Come on, sit up a little.’

He helps Illya sit, plumps the pillows behind him, gives him water. Illya sits there and feels the hot throbbing pain in his shoulders and stares at the wall on the other side of the room, and something falls apart inside him.

‘I’m so tired,’ he says brokenly. ‘I just want to be able to sleep.’

‘I know,’ Napoleon smiles. ‘I know.’

Napoleon sits down on the edge of the bed, lays a hand on Illya’s hip again. He won’t touch Illya’s arms because it hurts too much. Can’t lay a hand on his shoulder. So he’s reduced to strange gestures; resting his hand on Illya’s head as if he’s a priest giving a blessing; the intimacy of touching his hip or laying a palm on his naked thigh. Sometimes he sits at the end of the bed and rubs Illya’s feet, stretching out each toe, bending the foot back and forwards. Illya isn’t sure why he does that. Maybe it’s because Napoleon feels such a deep need to care and comfort and this is as far away from Illya’s agonised shoulders as he can get. Anyway, it feels so good.

‘Give me my slings,’ Illya says.

It’s such a relief to take the slings off, to be able to move his forearms, to let the sweat evaporate, to lay his arms at his sides. But that relief is so short-lived. He sleeps, and then he wakes knowing that he needs the slings so badly, needs something to stabilise the ruined joints, needs the support for his arms. He had never realised just how heavy a human arm is, but they are such heavy things, all bone and muscle. His muscle is wasting, but they’re still heavy, too heavy for joints which bore the ten stone weight of his body before and after they were wrenched out of their sockets.

Napoleon gets the slings and helps Illya to sit forward. He ever so carefully nests one forearm in the support, fixes it around his neck, gets the other sling, fits that one with tender care. The slings make his neck ache and he thinks they make his shoulders ache, but aching is nothing to the searing pain.

‘Where were you this time?’ Napoleon asks.

‘Huh?’ Illya wonders.

‘The dream. What happened?’

Illya gives a grim smile.

‘In the ballroom. Hanging in the ballroom. There were people there, dancing. None of them would help me.’

‘Rogues, all of them,’ Napoleon says with a smile. He’s trying to lift Illya up, trying to stop his dark rumination. ‘I hope you told them so.’

Illya gives his own smile. ‘Well, I pissed on them,’ he says.

That’s not exactly true. He doesn’t remember the urine touching a single one of them, and in the dream he was mortified at the idea that that might happen. But here in the waking world he smiles and accepts Napoleon’s invitation to levity, and he rewrites the dream in his head, so he’s hanging there without pain, and he lets loose a free stream of golden liquid to douse those indifferent people who let him hang.

Napoleon grins. ‘That should teach them.’

Illya smiles, but the levity is dropping away. Nothing teaches them. Nothing stops the nightmares. Every time he sleeps he knows he will dream of it again. He knows his pain will seep into his dreams and he’ll be helpless again, hanging, prey to every fear his mind can dredge up.

‘I want to drop the counselling,’ he says suddenly. ‘I want to cash in all my leave and get in the car and I want to go somewhere a long way away. No houses. Somewhere cool. Somewhere with a lake, maybe.’

Napoleon smiles, but his eyes are serious.

‘No go, _tovarisch_ ,’ he says. ‘If you dropped the counselling Waverly would drop _you_.’

‘I know,’ Illya murmurs. Psychological well being is so important to an agent. Waverly won’t let anyone out in the field who isn’t passed by Psych.

‘Besides, you couldn’t sit in a car for that long. It hurts you enough just to get in to Headquarters.’

‘I _know_ ,’ Illya says, starting to feel a hot irritation. ‘I know. It’s a fantasy. What would I do with a lake? I can’t swim. I know I can’t sit in a car for that long. Anyway, the nightmares are in here.’

He wants to raise an arm, to tap a finger to the side of his head, and he can’t.

‘I just – I don’t like counselling,’ he says.

He hates unravelling himself in front of someone, hates digging deep into his fears and confessing them all. He hates having to go over and over and over those long four days and three nights and keep remembering the dragging, agonising hours, the dark, lonely silence of the nights, the empty hours of the days. He remembers them all the time anyway, and talking about them is so hard.

‘I know,’ Napoleon says.

He’s overcome with a flash of memory. Hanging there, the chains biting around his wrists, his hands numb. That rank, thick blindfold over his eyes and nose. His mouth open because he’s so thirsty, hungry too, but so very thirsty that he could vomit. The pain in his shoulders that keeps on and on and on, that merciless pain that throbs with every beat of his heart and intensifies every time he moves, that reaches into everything, wraps itself around him, informs every thought. His feet hanging bare and useless above the ground, his abdomen tight with the weight of his legs, his ribcage pushed out and every breath a shallow struggle. And the itching, heavy feeling of shit in his trousers, the clammy damp of the piss he’s been forced to let go. The smell of it all rising around him, coming into his nose and mouth every time he draws in breath. It’s so hard to breathe, so hard to breathe…

‘Illya.’

Napoleon’s hand is on his thigh, moving, not quite shaking him, but just moving enough to draw him back.

‘Illya, come on,’ Napoleon says, and he clicks his fingers in front of Illya’s face as if drawing him out of hypnosis. ‘Come back. Come back here.’

Illya gasps and breathes and tries to shake away the remembered scent, the horror, the thirst and the breathlessness and the unending pain. It’s like a creature that follows him, holding on to his leg, never letting him turn away, never letting him forget.

‘You’re sore tonight,’ Napoleon says, reaching out a hand towards Illya’s shoulder. He doesn’t touch the flesh but Illya flinches all the same. Napoleon just holds his hand above Illya’s skin. ‘I can feel the heat radiating off you. It must be sore.’

‘It’s always sore,’ Illya says. ‘But it’s bad tonight.’

He’s not sure if the pain’s worse tonight or if it’s just his ability to cope with it which is at such a low ebb. He feels so depleted, so worn down. Napoleon turns to the night stand and opens the little drawer. He looks at the contents for a moment, then takes out a little vial of morphine and a syringe.

‘I’m making an executive decision,’ he says. ‘Senior partner’s prerogative. I want you to get some better sleep. You haven’t got any appointments in the morning. I’ll let you sleep as long as you need.’

Illya eyes the vial and the syringe, and he wants to be strong and refuse it, but he knows that there’s bliss and sleep waiting for him in that little glass container.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right, give me the morphine. I need it tonight.’

So he lies back in the bed and watches as Napoleon punctures the foil on the vial with the needle, turns the whole lot upside down, draws a full dose up into the syringe, then taps any remaining air to the top and presses it out through the needle.

‘Okay,’ Napoleon says, and he finds a place on Illya’s thigh that hasn’t already been stabbed, swabs it lightly, and presses in the dose.

Illya lies with his eyes half closed, waiting for that blessed oblivion to come. Napoleon stays sitting on the bed, just watching him. He starts to feel it come, that warmth, that ease. The pain in his shoulders matters less and less.

‘Getting there, huh?’ Napoleon asks, and Illya smiles.

‘Yes, getting there,’ he replies.

He is starting to drift. Everything feels perfect. His shoulders still hurt, but it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter. What’s pain, anyway? He’s in such a wonderful place.

  


((O))

  


He’s not sure if he’s awake or asleep. He drifts and drifts. He’s on a raft, on one of those fragile yellow inflatable rafts, adrift on the sea. The only thing around him is water. So deep, so cold. The depths are endless. He looks down into the water despite the dark and there is a foot, perhaps, of translucence, but then it is dark, just dark. If he fell in he would sink forever, sink down into the dead, cold depths where nothing can survive. He would be like those poor lost souls of the Titanic, frozen, sinking, sinking, into a place where not even fish will feed on his bones.

He’s so sick. He doesn’t like the sea. Underneath him the swell rises and falls, the raft sways, his stomach churns. He wants to pull himself to the side so he can hang his head over the water, so if he’s sick he’ll be sick into the water, but he can’t pull himself because his arms don’t work, because they hurt so much, because his shoulders are burning and screaming with pain.

What happened to his arms? Why do his arms hurt so much? He remembers hanging from a net, salty wet, cold, his clothes heavy on his body. He hates that taste of salt in his mouth. Whenever he licks his lips he tastes salt. The raft rocks beneath him and he lies there and moans because his stomach is churning and his shoulders burn and he can’t move at all. He’s helpless. Can’t move, can’t even paddle the raft a little. And there’s a ship out there, out in the darkness. He can hear the white water surging in front of the bows. A bone in its teeth. Isn’t that what they say? The ship has a bone in its teeth, like a dog, and it's bearing down on him, coming out of the darkness. He can’t shout. Can’t paddle out of its path.

He flops towards the side of the raft and water splashes into the rubbery bottom, more and more water. The sea is churning, rising all around him, slopping into the raft. His legs are soaked and he has to hitch his chin on the swollen side to keep his mouth and nose out of the water. The ship is coming, coming, the raft is dipping beneath him, losing integrity, letting the water take him. The bows of the boat are a great black wall, reaching up into the dark night. The white churning water. A bone in its teeth. And he’s in the water, salt water in his mouth, up his nose. He’s tumbling, turning, he can’t use his arms, he’s being sucked under the water, under the merciless bows, struck by the cold black metal. He’s under, under, his lungs are bursting, he can’t breathe, he can’t swim, he can’t –

He wakes choking and gasping, trying to spit water out of his mouth, trying to suck in air. But there’s no water. There’s no water at all. There’s no salt in his mouth. There’s just warm night air, so warm it feels solid. There is the yellow glow of the bedside light, and Napoleon asleep in his narrow bed just across the room, his mouth a little open, a black hole in the dim light. Illya lies there with his head on the pillow, trying to calm the heaving of his lungs. He tries to sit up and fails. His arms aren’t in their slings and as he tries to sit they’re left behind on the bed, and the pain is just too much.

He curses under his breath and lies there, trying to recover from that spike of pain. Usually by now Napoleon has woken up and come to him, but perhaps tonight Napoleon is extra tired, or perhaps Illya was quieter than usual. Perhaps he wasn’t trying to scream. You can’t scream underwater.

Oh, his shoulders throb. The pain in them is like red hot rods of metal. There are tears in his eyes, trickling down into the hair at his temples, and he can’t brush them away.

He hardens his stomach muscles and fights to sit again. Finally, he manages it. He looks at the glass of water on the night stand and wishes he knew a magic spell that would bring it to his mouth. There’s a straw in the water but just turning his body to drink hurts him. He wishes Napoleon was awake, but he doesn’t want to wake him. He feels a silly little thread of resentment that Napoleon hasn’t woken up, but he really doesn’t want to wake him. It’s stifling in the room and he wants Napoleon to turn on the air conditioning or open the window, and to give him his water, but he just can’t make himself wake him.

To get at the water it’s easiest to turn towards the side of the bed and put his feet on the floor. He has to work to get his legs out from under the sheet. Then he leans forward and gets the straw between his lips, feeling the soft carpet under the soles of his feet, feeling the burn in his shoulders as he leans. He can’t suck the water as fast as he would like. He feels so thirsty. He looks at the glass and looks down at his arms. His right is useless with the cast on his wrist, but he starts to try to lift his left. Even without the weight of a plaster cast it feels so heavy. His bones must be made of lead.

He manages to raise his forearm, and he clumsily gets it onto the top of the night stand. He inches his hand towards the glass. His shoulder screams, the other shoulder throbbing in sympathy. His fingers touch the glass and it feels strange, as if he’s touching it through a rubbery barrier. His fingers are stiff and don’t want to obey his instructions. But he curls them slowly around the glass and tries to lift it up towards his mouth.

He might as well be trying to lift an ingot of gold. He can’t even get his numb fingers to grip. It’s as if he can’t tell where the glass is. He can’t make his fingers tighten. He tries in frustration just to make them close, to lift the damn thing, and the glass is slewing over, the water sloshing out and down, dripping over the edge of the night stand and onto his foot.

‘God damn it,’ he mutters.

In his own bed, Napoleon stirs, moves under his thin sheet cover like a creature stirring in its den, and then suddenly opens his eyes.

‘Illya!’ He blinks and rubs his eyes and says again, ‘Illya, what in hell are you doing?’

He is so fed up, so brimming over with anger.

‘Trying to get a blasted drink of water,’ he spits. ‘Stupid, fu-’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon cautions him. ‘Be nice, now.’

He isn’t in the mood. He really isn’t in the mood. But he’s helpless. His arms are useless, his right with the wrist in a cast and his left lying on the night stand, lying in the water that’s still dripping onto the floor. Napoleon gets up and gently lifts Illya’s arm and lays it in his lap. He gets a towel to clean up the spill and at the same time brings back the glass of water full, and holds it to Illya’s lips. Illya drinks, then turns his head away from the glass, and Napoleon puts it back down.

‘It’s too early for painkillers,’ he says. ‘Do you think you can get back to sleep?’

‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ Illya says.

He feels tired anyway. He feels heavy and tired. The air in the room is hot but outside it has started to rain. The rain hits the window in heavy, metallic drops and somewhere far away there is a low rumble that is more felt than heard.

‘Thunder,’ Napoleon says.

‘I didn’t know I was rooming with a meteorologist,’ Illya replies snidely, and Napoleon makes a face.

The seconds pass, long and hot and empty. The window is suddenly lit with white sheet lightning that for a split second makes everything in the room brilliant, and twenty seconds later a rumble follows it.

‘Help me lie down,’ Illya says.

‘I should make you sit up all night, for that crack,’ Napoleon replies, but he helps Illya lie and then refills his glass and puts the straw back in it, and goes to turn on the air conditioning.

It hums for a few minutes, and Illya lies on his back and stares at the ceiling. Napoleon gets back into his own bed. But then the air conditioning goes off, and the light goes off, and all of the lights outside must be off too, because the window is black.

‘Damn,’ Napoleon says. ‘Blackout. And you can have that expert opinion for free.’

‘Do you have candles?’ Illya asks.

‘In the kitchen cupboard. I’ll get them. You stay there, Illya. No moving around unless you need to.’

Illya resists a tart reply. He just lies there while Napoleon goes stumbling through the dark and comes back after a few minutes, matches rattling in their box as he moves. Just as he enters the room it is lit up again by lightning. Napoleon flicks a flame from a lighter and holds it wavering in the dark as another rumble of thunder sounds, closer this time. With the light shining up from below he looks as if he’s in a bad horror film.

‘I won’t light the candles unless we need them,’ he says. ‘Risk of fire. Let’s both go back to sleep.’

So Illya lies in the dark, closes his eyes, tries not to think about the pain that keeps throbbing and throbbing in his shoulders. The cast on his wrist is itching, and in some ways that’s worse than the pain. The heat makes his skin prickle and he wishes he could go out and stand in the rain. He wishes he could stride out into the street, naked as he is, and just stand there, letting the water stream down his hot skin.

Lightning again, and the thunder comes hot on its heels, loud and long, rolling over and over. For just a moment, a freeze-frame in a film, Illya can see Napoleon lying on his bed, without even a sheet over him, eyes open but body relaxed. Napoleon’s head is on its side, and in that split second their eyes meet.

In the sudden, intense darkness afterwards, Napoleon says, ‘Would you like me to tell you a bedtime story? ’

Illya grunts and closes his eyes. He just wants to sleep. He’s so tired that his head aches. The painkillers for his shoulders are so strong that they should kill headaches too, but they don’t.

He uses the drumming of the rain as an aid to relaxation. Even the thunder feels soothing, although the flashes of lightning jolt him every time they come, making him see red light through his closed eyelids, momentarily jerking him out of his sleepy state.

If it had rained while he was hanging in that château, how would that have been? He remembers the first night hanging there, the numbness in his hands, the pain in his wrists, the tiredness that ached through every part of him. His spine feeling like a series of beads stretched out on their thread, about to break. His legs feeling so heavy and useless. The wetness in his trousers, the fabric sticking on his skin, the scent of urine that rose up around him. There had been so little noise through that first night to give time any definition. Without noise and without sight one is in limbo. He wonders if limbo involves pain or just nothingness. He’s never paid much attention to Christian doctrine. But pain itself is a kind of limbo, when the pain goes on and on and doesn’t stop. A constant presence can become a nothing, like white noise.

If it had rained, perhaps he would have been aware of the windows of the room as the drops beat on the glass. Perhaps he would have heard it striking the leaves of the trees and the flat walls. If there had been flashes of lightning he could have counted the time between the light and the rumbles of thunder, and in knowing how far away the lightning was he would have been given an idea of the countryside spreading out around him. As the rain waxed and waned he would have been given a sense of time.

But there hadn’t been rain, or thunder. The daylight had faded on the other side of the blindfold into a velvet blackness. For a while he had heard birds singing, but that had faded too. The heat had left with the sun, transmuting into a chill that’s hard to imagine now, in this New York summer night. And he had hung there, hung there, his hands bloated and stiff and numb, his wrists hurting beyond endurance with the chains biting into them, his elbow joints and shoulders searing, his chest pulled forward and his lungs unable to fully fill with air. He had hung there, his spine aching, his hips hurting, his legs dead weights pulling him down, aching and aching and aching. It was all beyond endurance, but he had been forced to endure it all.

He feels the well of ridiculous grief like a balloon being slowly inflated somewhere beneath his ribs. He feels the wetness of tears start to run down his cheeks, and he can’t wipe it away. What is he crying for? He’s here now, isn’t he? He’s safe. Napoleon came. He keeps telling himself that, as if against all the evidence it could possibly be true that Napoleon didn’t come, that he is hanging there still, dead from dehydration, rotting in those chains.

The bed is soft underneath him. Napoleon is just a few feet away. He is safe, he is here. Napoleon came.

The emotion he felt when he knew Napoleon was there is something he can’t quantify. It’s like trying to capture water in a net. He can’t remember if it were joy or relief or amazement. It was the sudden fracture between the certainty of his death and the certainty of his life. Napoleon came. Napoleon broke the chains and carried him down and laid him on the floor and tended to him, and he has been looking after him ever since. Is that why he’s crying? Because there is still so much pain, because he still doesn’t know if he’ll ever really recover? What if the pain in his shoulders never goes? What if he can never use his arms again? Will Napoleon be looking after him for the rest of his life?

The physios keep telling him he will recover. The doctors tell him he’ll recover. The psychiatrist tells him he’ll recover. But lying here in the utter darkness it all comes over him like a flood. He is so tired of the pain. So tired of the helplessness. So tired of remembering over and over the horror of those four days and three nights.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says in the darkness.

He swallows and tries to steady himself. He doesn’t want Napoleon to know that he is crying.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘Go to sleep,’ Napoleon tells him.

If only it were that easy. He lies there and listens to the pattering of the rain, to the wind hitting the walls of the building, to the murmurs of thunder that are slowly moving away. And then the bedside light comes on, a sudden glow of light through his eyelids that’s softer than the lightning and doesn’t fade away. He looks sideways and sees that Napoleon has taken his own advice. He’s lying there with his mouth a little open, his eyes closed, deep in sleep. He looks at the clock and sees it’s still an hour before he can have any more painkillers. His shoulders hurt so much. Is there even any point in trying to sleep? The decision is too much. He’s so tired, but not sleepy at all. So he lies there and waits.

  


((O))

  


He is a grown man, but he’s a little boy. The buildings are tall around him. There’s smoke in the sky. There always seems to be smoke in the sky now. It twists and blooms and billows in great clouds. It stings in his nostrils. They burnt the library. Oh, they burnt the library. It’s like burning a treasure house. The air is full of pages, floating down, ash pages with the words still on them. He tries to grab a page of ash and it falls apart in his hands, and he feels as though he has killed it, he has killed those words. He feels such a great weight of responsibility for killing the words on that page.

But there are bodies in the streets, real bodies. There are adults with blood all over them, limp like dolls. There is a broken boy, a little boy like him. They are killing people. They are taking people away. And there’s that man. There’s that man again, the bank manager, hanging from an iron bar. He looks like a sack, all bloated and strange. His face all bloated and strange. Hanging, hanging, so still in the still air, the ash and the pages falling down around him. Men marching in grey uniforms. Mutters of hatred. He’s so scared. He’s so scared. He wants to run away. He wants to hide. He stands there in plain sight as a column of men in grey march past, and he doesn’t know where  _mama_ is.  _Tato_ is gone. He can’t move. His feet won’t move. He stands by a tall grey building and the men are marching past and that body is hanging there, its face a ruin.

And then they turn. As one they turn. Words are barked in German that he doesn’t understand. He strains to understand. They turn to him and point at him and he wants to run, he wants to hide. He is a child but he is an adult. They don’t care. They’re after him now, breaking ranks, running him down even though he can’t move. They’re raising their guns, their bayonets like knives, pointing straight at him. Grabbing him, shaking him. A fist is raised and seems bigger than his head, and suddenly he’s on the ground, moaning, trying to raise a limp arm, trying to move a dead leg. But they haul him up. They put chains around his wrists. They’re hanging him up, facing that dead man, facing the bank manager. His face is level with that dead face. They hang him from his wrists. He’s so close he can smell death in the air. The man’s lips are peeling back. His eyes are marbles. He can smell the breath of death all around him. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, he hasn’t done anything, he’s a boy, a boy, he hasn’t done anything. But his face is staring into the dead face. He can see the man’s yellow teeth behind his peeling lips. He can see the flesh starting to rot. The soldiers in grey poke him with their guns, set him swinging, laugh as he cries out because his wrists hurt, his shoulders hurt, it all hurts so much. Each swing puts him closer to the dead man. He tries to scream but his voice won’t work. He is getting closer, closer. His lips are touching the dead man’s lips. He is kissing him, kissing his peeling lips, breathing his death, and suddenly he can scream and –

‘Illya! Illya!’

The room is full of his scream, every bit of the air filled with his scream. He can’t stop it coming out. Napoleon is looking down at him but he can feel the dead man’s lips on his, he can taste his death, and he goes on screaming and screaming.

‘Illya!  _ Illya! _ ’

He can’t. He can’t. The fear is bigger than anything. He can see the bedroom. He can see Napoleon. But the fear is bigger than that. It’s a terrible, terrible shroud. It fills the air.

‘Illya, for God’s sake, you’ll wake the whole block! Come out of it now. Come on. Come out of it.’

He fixes his eyes onto Napoleon’s. He tries so hard. Napoleon’s brown eyes. His living brown eyes. Alive. Alive.

He can see that hanging man. He can see his filmed and marble eyes. He can taste his lips. Oh god, his dead lips…

‘О боже, о боже, о боже...’

‘Illya, speak English,’ Napoleon says gently.

His mouth is gaping open. He didn’t realise he wasn’t speaking English, but he is still there, still half there, in his Kyiv, in the burning city, and all his childhood words were Ukrainian.

‘Наполеон,’ he says. ‘Наполеон...’

‘Come on,’ Napoleon says, helping him to sit, putting a hand firmly in the centre of his back, supporting him as he wavers. ‘Come on, now. A little drink. You’re all right? You’re white as a sheet.’

‘Вибачте, вибачте,’ he says, and then tries to wrench himself into a language that Napoleon can understand, and says, ‘I’m sorry, Napoleon. So sorry...’

‘No, no,’ Napoleon says. ‘No, it’s all right. Water? Yes?’

And he lifts the glass to Illya’s lips, and he drinks, but he feels revolted, he feels nausea, because he can remember kissing that dead man, because it feels so real, because he doesn’t know what to think about what he did.

‘Here,’ Napoleon says, and he holds out two pills, and when he slips them between Illya’s lips he tries not to feel revolted by that touch. He feels so confused. His lips feel foul. He was kissing that dead man. Why was he kissing that man?

‘You think you can get back to sleep?’ Napoleon asks.

‘No,’ Illya says instantly. It doesn’t even take thought. The fear is white and vivid inside him. He is full up with fear and revulsion.

Napoleon looks like he’s hiding a sigh, but then he smiles and says, ‘Well, I wasn’t tired anyway. Who needs sleep?’

‘Go to sleep,’ Illya urges him. ‘I don’t need babysitting. I’m a grown man.’

He was a child in the dream. A child but an adult. Hanging there, hanging in front of the hanged man, coming closer and closer, their mouths touching…

He feels so confused.

‘Come on,’ Napoleon says, and Illya stares at him.

‘Come on?’

He is naked under the sheet. Napoleon is opening a drawer and taking out underpants. He brings Illya underwear and a shirt and a pair of slacks.

‘Come on,’ he says again. ‘You can’t go out there naked, even if it is hot enough to roast chestnuts.’

‘Out – where?’

Napoleon pulls back the sheet and his eyes fall on the remains of the erection that Illya woke with.

‘That kind of dream, huh?’

Illya is horrified. He remembers kissing that dead man, the feel of those lips. Did that arouse him? How could that arouse him?

‘No.  _ No! _ ’ he says, but he doesn’t know what to think.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Napoleon tells him. ‘We’re both men, yes? We both know that sometimes just a breeze in the right direction gets you going.’

‘I wasn’t – ’ Illya tries to protest.  _ Kissing that hanging man, his face pressed against his, on his dead lips, the taste of his death… _

‘ _ Illya _ ,’ Napoleon says more firmly. ‘I don’t know what you were dreaming about. It doesn’t matter. Dreams don’t make any sense. It doesn’t matter. Now, come on. Get your arms in.’

It always hurts to put on a shirt. It’s better wearing a button up shirt. He can’t manage a t-shirt yet. But it’s still agony to sit there while Napoleon eases the sleeves onto his arms and up over his shoulders. It’s a blessed relief when he’s done up a few buttons and is fixing Illya’s slings.

He lets Napoleon dress him, but he’s still not sure what’s going on. Napoleon gets dressed himself. Slacks. Poloshirt. A jacket to hide his holster, because Napoleon isn’t going to walk out into the streets at this time of night without being armed.

He kneels on the carpet in front of Illya and says, 'Let's see if the glass slipper fits, huh?' and Illya says automatically, 'It was fur. The glass is a mistranslation - and completely impractical for dancing.'

'So is fur in this heat,' Napoleon replies without looking up.

He slips Illya’s socks and shoes onto his feet. He does up the laces and looks up and smiles.

‘All ready,  _ tovarisch _ ? Yes? Come on.’

‘Napoleon, where are we going?’ Illya asks.

‘Outside,’ Napoleon says in an uncompromising tone.

‘I deduced that much,’ Illya says, but he stands anyway, and waits while Napoleon checks his gun and picks up wallet and keys.

‘Come on,’ Napoleon says. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  


((O))

  


Walking hurts his shoulders, but then lying hurts his shoulders, talking hurts his shoulders, eating hurts his shoulders. So they step out into the empty street and the heat is still shimmering up off the ground even though the sky is dark, washed with a muddy orange brown by the lights of the city. Illya glances up and wishes he could see the stars. It’s good to be somewhere where you can see stars. He supposes he would have been able to see the stars through the windows in that ballroom, if it hadn’t been for the blindfold over his eyes. He might have been able to hang there like a Christmas bauble and gaze at the stars through the windows, and their passage would have told him something about the movement of time.

‘It was difficult,’ he says very quietly. ‘It was difficult not being able to see while I was hanging there.’

Napoleon glances at him in the glow from the street lights. ‘Would it have made that much difference, really?’

Again he wants to shrug. Instead he makes a moue with his lips.

‘I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t. But for a while there would have been something to occupy myself with. If I could have seen through the windows – ’

‘What?’ Napoleon asks.

He really doesn’t know. Maybe he would have seen someone out there, someone moving quietly, someone completely unaware of his presence, but  _ there _ . And he would have been able to shout or scream, and they would have come. But he couldn’t spend all those long hours shouting just in case there was someone out there. It was exhausting just hanging, and his throat had been so dry. He just couldn’t have spent all his time crying out.

‘Well, I could have watched the trees in the wind,’ he says, because it seems too desperate, too weak, to say,  _ Someone might have been there. Someone might have helped me. _

Napoleon is silent. It’s as if he doesn’t know what to say. Their footsteps are the only sound on the deserted street. There aren’t even any cars, not right here. There is nothing but their footsteps.

‘All right,’ Illya says suddenly, as if Napoleon has been pressing him mercilessly. ‘All right. It would have given me some hope. Perhaps if I could have seen through the windows I might have – seen someone. I might have seen lights at night. Anything.’

‘Ah,’ Napoleon says, in such a tone of understanding that it’s as if he has looked straight into Illya’s soul. Napoleon has never been hung like that, but he’s been captured, he’s been tortured. Illya suddenly realises that he must understand better than he had ever realised.

‘Hope,’ Napoleon says after a long silence, ‘is sometimes the only thing that keeps a man alive.’

‘Well, I hoped that you would come,’ Illya replies. He did. Every minute he was waiting for Napoleon to come. He was terribly afraid that he wouldn’t come in time, but he always thought that Napoleon was looking for him. Partners don’t let each other down.

‘Even towards the end?’ Napoleon asks.

The end… It was a very long end, a very drawn out end. The end was when he fell, when he was trying to reach the chains with his feet, and he fell, and his arms were ripped from their sockets, and his ten stone weight dropped and hung from his agonised joints. Maybe that was when he stopped hoping, when he stopped waiting for Napoleon. That was when everything condensed down to an exquisite awareness of just how much pain his body could feel. That was when his mind started to really turn in on itself.

‘I don’t know what I thought towards the end,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if I was really sane then.’

Napoleon looks at him. Just looks. His gaze moves from Illya’s face to his shoulders, and back again.

‘Well, you were babbling the Soviet national anthem when I came in on you,’ he says.

‘That’s not a sign of insanity,’ Illya points out.

‘No,’ Napoleon says.

They have reached the end of the block. There’s no need to look left and right before crossing the road because there’s no traffic. It’s not until they get further downtown that things start to pick up. There are cars and cabs and straggling pedestrians. A police car glides past. Clubs are open. Napoleon nods towards the door of a twenty four hour café, and ushers Illya inside.

‘Two coffees,’ he tells the server. ‘Black, thank you. Do you have any straws?’

So they sit at a formica table by the window and the man brings over two cups of coffee, and he looks at Illya’s slings and drops a straw into his cup.

‘Looks painful,’ he says.

Illya glances up at this man who is working at the dead of night in a deserted café, and says, ‘It is, rather.’

‘What makes a man decide to open a café at this time of night?’ Napoleon asks, and the guy shrugs.

‘There’s always folks want coffee. Police, night workers. Guys like you guys.’

‘Guys like you guys,’ Napoleon repeats curiously.

‘Police,’ the man says again. ‘You’re not wearing uniforms, but you’re police. You get a ten percent discount, by the way.’

‘Oh,’ Napoleon says, and he meets Illya’s eyes very briefly in a silent laugh. ‘Thank you.’

And the man walks away, goes back to stand behind the counter, where he stands and wipes cups with a white cloth. Illya drinks his coffee through the straw, taking it slowly because the liquid is so hot. Napoleon lifts his own cup with perfect poise, sipping, putting it back on the saucer, picking it up, sipping again. The caffeine sinks into Illya’s body and helps a little with the pain. He’s starting to forget the dream. He’s starting to feel part of the real world again.

They walk back along the river, and the water is black and laps with soft, black noises on the shore. Ripples slap on the hulls of moored boats. Metal clinks. The city lights reflect from the water like moon trails, many of them, stretching out across that dark, silken surface. They walk in silence, but the silence is good.

In the apartment Napoleon undresses Illya as carefully as he dressed him, and fixes the slings back on once he’s naked, because his arms are tired from the walking, and he needs the support. He plumps up the pillows and puts a hand on Illya’s back to take his weight as he lies down. He turns on the air conditioning and makes sure the lampshade is tilted on the bedside lamp so the bulb doesn’t dazzle Illya’s eyes. He puts fresh water in the glass on the night stand and makes sure the straw is angled towards the bed. Illya lies there with his shoulders throbbing and the caffeine just starting to ebb in his system, and he’s actually starting to feel sleepy again. He feels warm and safe and sleepy.

Napoleon pulls the sheet a little further up over Illya’s body and smooths it where it hangs over the edge of the bed. He kisses his own fingertips and touches them to Illya’s forehead. He smiles.

‘Sweet dreams,’ he says.


End file.
